Lawmakers question state's investment in bioscience

Ken Dixon

Published 9:39 pm, Thursday, March 7, 2013

HARTFORD -- Republicans skeptical of a proposal by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy to create a 10-year, $200 million fund to foster bioscience innovation were outnumbered by Democrats on the legislative Commerce Committee on Thursday.

The Democratic majority approved the bill, sending it to the Finance Committee for further review.

Sen. L. Scott Frantz, R-Greenwich, and Rep. Gail Lavielle, R-Wilton, the ranking members of the committee, questioned the large investment at a time when the state continues to lose jobs.

"What concerns me is that over the last two years and what it looks like for the next year or so, or certainly during this session, is that we will be committing a tremendous amount of resources to this one area," Frantz said. "And we all learned early on in our careers in business is that putting all of one's eggs into one basket may not be the most intelligent thing to do, especially if those are big, billion-dollar eggs."

He called for more of an "experimental" investment, in stages. "That way we'll know three and four years down the road whether this is, in fact, working or not," said Frantz, who ended up voting to bring the bill out of committee.

"One of my questions has been, `so where do we stop before we've sufficiently seen where we're going and how effective it is?' " said Lavielle, who opposed the bill. She said Malloy plans to spend $1.8 billion out of $3.1 billion in future bonding to create jobs.

"This is a policy that has been in place for a couple of years now, and we find that our workforce has shrunk more than any other state in the last year and we also have a persistent unemployment rate," she said.

Sen. Gary Lebeau, D-East Haven, committee co-chairman, said that the governor's bill is written so that funding could cease if there were a change of gubernatorial administrations or for other reasons. He asked for Lavielle and Frantz to support the bill.

"I have to express my surprise at the potential opposition to the bill," Lebeau said. "We've had lots of opportunities to talk about this and this is the first I've heard of problems with this bill."

He said the $200 million is spread out over 10 years, with $10 million a year in the early part of the period, allowing for annual legislative and gubernatorial review.

"What you're asking for is already built into the bill," Lebeau said. "We've made large investments. But what we haven't done is provide that next step, which is the translation from that basic research into helping companies become realities. It's an essential piece for moving to the next step with what we want to do, which is provide jobs."